An Obscured Message

An Obscured Message

Memory of the Camps is an hour-long documentary detailing the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. It was assembled from footage taken by cameramen traveling with Allied troops in 1945 by the British Millitary with the purpose of humiliating the Germans and documenting their war crimes for the world. The project remained unfinished until it was completed many years later by talented filmmakers, including well-known director Alfred Hitchcock, and it was presented on May 7, 1985 on the U.S. television show Frontline. The film was aired with the purpose of, as the film itself states, "[creating] document to serve our collective memory" (Memory of the Camps). By this statement, the narrator Trevor Howard means that by viewing the atrocities committed by the Germans we can understand how horrifying the holocaust was, and through that understanding we can prevent it from happening again. Even the title of the film, "Memory of the Camps", shows that the purpose of the film is remembrance. This purpose is similar the message Susan Sontag delivers in her book Regarding the Pain of Others, in which she emphasizes that we must face an unpleasant confrontation in order to truly understand what we're seeing and to have compassion for those we're regarding. Indeed, Memory of the Camps bombards its viewers with horrifying